Mentoring Service
Richard Power
The mentoring service for ACL’06 is now finished. Most papers were returned to
authors by the deadline (21st February), but a few were late, mostly because
demand was much greater than in previous years. However, all arrived in time
for the authors to incorporate the suggestions.
We received 20 papers for revision (compared with 7 last year). They came from
China (8), Japan (5), Spain, Germany, Morocco, Tunisia, Korea, Germany, and a
Japanese speaker in Australia (one each).
The mentors were Deborah Dahl, Lila Ghemri, Chrys Chrystello, John Nerbonne,
and Florence Reeder, all unpaid volunteers. Because of the increased demand
most of them had to do four papers, as compared to 1-2 papers last year. This
was too much: if we continue the service next year we need to recruit more
mentors, since the demand especially from the far east is likely to increase further.
As in previous years, the mentors took a lot of trouble over the papers and
their suggestions were much appreciated by the authors. I encouraged the
mentors not to correct all instances of basic errors like omitting the
article in English, just to correct one or two and note the general rule,
but the amount of work required was still considerable – we really have to
get the number of papers per mentor down to 1-2.